This week, Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum started feeling a little heat over his scheme that bilks Pennsylvania taxpayers for $100,000 to pay for his kids’ homeschool education in Virginia. Yesterday, instead of fighting the controversy upstream, Santorum gave up and promised to end the abuse.
Sen. Rick Santorum says he will pull his five school-age children out of an Internet-based school paid for by Pennsylvania taxpayers after coming under criticism because the family lives much of the time in Virginia.
In a statement issued late Wednesday, Santorum said he and his wife would go back to home-schooling the youngsters, as they had done in the past.
There was no point in fighting this one; Santorum was hurt by the revelation and would be further hurt the longer the controversy lingered.
But the mini-flap may have reverberations when Santorum runs for a third term in ’06. When first elected to the Senate in ’96, Santorum’s family sold their Pittsburgh-area home to buy a house in northern Virginia (worth over $750,000). After serving in the Senate for a year, Santorum bought a small, two-bedroom home in Penn Hills for $87,800, but apparently had no intention of living there. Indeed, no one seems to know if Santorum has ever even seen the house he bought.
Voters are sometimes sensitive to these issues, expecting their elected officials to have some connection to the communities they serve. How can senators stay in touch with the needs and concerns of their state, the argument goes, if they never live in it? Sometimes constituents don’t care (Bob Dole didn’t even own a home in Kansas when he last ran for re-election) and sometimes they do (Tom Daschle was hurt badly this year by revelations that his primary residence was a beautiful home in upper northwest DC).
Santorum will obviously have to subsidize his kids’ homeschool education on his own now, as he should. But this dust-up may prove to be damaging anyway as Pennsylvanians learn of Santorum’s choice of residence.